Helen Stephenson's Derbyshire Break Pictures - December, 2005 - Chesterfield

When we had been in Derbyshire for a couple of days, we decided that it was time to download our memory cards onto our new Jobo Giga One 30GB storage device. Stephen had charged the battery before we left home, but he hadn't actually tried copying a card to it, and I'd been too busy to do so.

So there we were in the middle of Derbyshire with a new untired storage device, and it turned out that it didn't work! We seemed to be getting an error message and the manual was not helpful. It didn't even have a troubleshooting section, much less a list of error codes. We started by phoning Camera World in London, from where we'd purchased it. Camera World were as mystified as we were, so they gave us the number for Jobo's UK agent, Intro 2020. A conversation with them yielded an interpretation of the error code, but as the way to fix it was by going where customers are not supposed to go without invalidating their warranty, Intro 2020 offered us an alternative solution: they arranged with Dents of Chesterfield to swap the unit for us.

We still had a bit of room left on our cards, so we made use of the precious winter daylight out in the Derbyshire countryside (with a side trip down the Treak Cliff Cavern as well) and then we headed into Chesterfield, which was reasonably close to our base in Cressbrook.

It was getting dark and the rush hour was on when we arrived in Chesterfield. We parked the car and headed on foot to the market square, where Dents are located, and where the faulty storage device was exchanged with a smile. I decided that I'd like to see the replacement Jobo Giga One actually working, so I produced a memory card and stuck it in, and it duly copied my precious images.

We thanked the staff at Dents, who by then were ready to pack up and go home for the day, and we headed back out into Chesterfield. It turned out to be a town which warrants a day-time visit, as they have a large open air market most days in their market square, and we arrived just as it was being packed up for the day.

As well as the open air market, Chesterfield is famous for the Church of St Mary and All Saints, whose spire is 9'5" out of true. As someone has very considerately installed floodlights around the church, a bit of darkness was no barrier to some photography there, although I wished that I'd had my film camera in Chesterfield and not 20 miles away in the cottage in Cressbrook, as I could have done with the 18-28 super wide angle zoom to fit the whole church into one picture! However, I didn't have it handy, so I made do with pictures of bits of the church!

This picture was taken from the same tripod spot as the one above it, but with a different white balance setting. This is probably nearer to "reality" than the last one, but I like the way the light catches the leaves of the tree in the last one.

The other interesting thing in Chesterfield when we visited in early December was the Christmas decorations. The tourist information building was a sight to behold, as its whole roof was covered in brilliant blue light. Alas, it really needed a bit of fading daylight to set it off, so I didn't get a picture of that. I did get some pictures of Christmas decorations with the crooked spire in the background. I like the one on the right that has a bus trail in it.

It came onto rain and I retreated under the awning of a market stall deserted by its owner at that time of the night. It made a good shelter for setting up my tripod, and I took some pictures of the decorations accessible from that vantage point.

Here's Santa, suspended in his sleigh between the buildings of Chesterfield.

I was particularly taken by this design of lights, which were used quite a bit in Chesterfield. I even got them reflected in a delivery lorry. I had to take that shot twice, as they were unloading it and someone stepped in or out during the first exposure and the lorry moved! These lights must have been the Christmas 2005 fashion, as I saw them in other town centres too.

I also had some fun with some of the decorations and got quite creative with the tilt head of my tripod and the zoom ring on my lens and got all sorts of interesting effects. These three pictures are (from the left) a straight exposure; an exposure with a down tilt at the end, causing the lights to look like droplets; and an exposure with an up tilt at the end, causing the lights to look like they're melting!

Then I locked the tripod up solid again and played with the zoom ring on my lens. It's a Sigma 28-300 I bought from eBay, and it's been a very good purchase. I started it at the 28mm end and zoomed it all the way out to 300mm during the exposure. The picture on the left is straight out of the camera, while the one on the right has been edited for printing without the bracket of the lights being visible so that it's completely abstract. The bracket shows up more in a print than here, but you can still see the line it makes in the left picture. The right picture has been brightened a touch, too.